Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote